EclipseLink/Development/Testing/StrawManProposal

From the EclipseLink DevMeeting 071017, create a straw-man proposal for a new consolidated testing framework

New Testing Framework

• based on JUnit4 - Why?
  • JUnit3 is at end-of-life
  • Eclipse IDE has built-in support for JUnit4 tests
  • while various testing frameworks have been extended, JUnit4 is extensible by design

Looking at requirements from MOXy/SDO/DBWS/JPA, this is what we've got so far ...

The Hollywood Principle

Don't call us, we'll call you The basic idea is to de-couple the tests from their resource setup requirements that currently are handled through Java inheritance (not the best for component re-use). The NTF instead injects the resource into a tagged context variable owned by the test. Setup for the context is done in a separate class with its own requirements for composition/aggregation/inheritance.

// javase imports
import java.util.Properties;

// JUnit imports
import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.BeforeClass;
import org.junit.Ignore;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertFalse;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertNotNull;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertTrue;

// ntf imports
import org.eclipse.persistence.ntf.TestContext;
import org.eclipse.persistence.ntf.TestContextRunner;
import org.eclipse.persistence.ntf.TestProperties;
import org.eclipse.persistence.ntf.Context;

@RunWith(TestContextRunner.class)
public class ASetOfSimpleTests {

    @TestProperties public static Properties properties;
    @TestContext(tag="context") public static Context<Object> context;

There are two things injected by the TestContextRunner:

1. Properties

• found in the ntf.xml file in the user's home directory:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
 <ntf>
   <properties>
     <property
       name="easy_as">pie</property>
   </properties>

the name and location of the ntf.xml file can be altered by the Java System properties -Dntf.file=some_other_file.name and -Dntf.dir=some/directory/path

• Java System properties

2. User-defined context object

• an external factory constructs an object that implements Context, providing a simple API to look up objects by name:

public interface Context<V> {

    public boolean containsObject(String objectName);

    public V getObject(String objectName);

}